Together with Jorge Hankamer at UCSC, I've been investigating the morphosyntax of definiteness marking in Scandinavian languages, primarily Danish, and its interactions with the internal structure of DPs in these languages, including attributive adjectives, relative clauses, and PP modifiers. Most recently, we have investigated the structure of pseudopartitives and how it interacts with definiteness marking (Definiteness marking and the structure of Danish pseudopartitives), and we are currently working on definiteness marking in DPs containing clausal complements to N.
I am interested in VP topicalization and VP anaphora constructions, especially ones that involve an overt proform. The latter are found in several Germanic languages (including Danish, Dutch, English, German, Norwegian, and Swedish), but there is relatively little work on these, compared with the very large literature on VP ellipsis. In joint work with Michael Houser, Maziar Toosarvandani, and early on also Ange Strom-Weber, I am investigating VP topicalization and VP anaphora constructions in Danish, including their interactions with verb second, tense marking, and A-bar extraction. Various aspects of this work have been presented in various venues (talks), and we have written two papers on the topic: one on the distribution of auxiliaries in VP topicalization and VP anaphora [Gøre-support in Danish] and one on the VP anaphora construction that employs an overt proform [Verb Phrase Pronominalization in Danish: Deep or Surface Anaphora?] We are also in the process of building an annotated and searchable database of attested examples. The database is accessible from a separate project website.
My dissertation work on copular clauses raised several questions that I was not able to deal with in the thesis itself nor in the book version published in 2005. Some of these questions I am still working on. One concerns the famously fixed information structure of specificational copular clauses. In a recent BLS paper (Specification under Discussion), I examine specificational clauses in the Question under Discussion framework and suggest a possible explanation for their information structural rigidity.
A second question has to do with so-called truncated clefts (It is Betsy; That is Betsy) and how they relate to the general taxonomy of copular clauses proposed by Higgins (1979). In the thesis I suggest that they can be understood as specificational clauses with pronominal subjects, and in this paper [On so-called truncated clefts] I try to spell out this proposal, and compare it two recent alternative proposals.
Thirdly, I am investigating object shift in various kinds of Danish copular clauses and at the 2006 LSA meeting in Albuquerque I argued that these data are difficult to reconcile with the prosodic approach to object shift proposed by Nomi Erteshik-Shir, whereas they fall into place under Holmberg's 1999 focus-based account [abstract | handout | paper].